On Tuesday, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un paid a surprise visit to Beijing. It was his first time out of his country since well before he became Dear Respected Leader in 2011. Kim arrived in an armored train, met with Chinese president Xi Jinping, and the two appeared in a series of photo-ops together, each saying nice things about the other and reaffirming the longstanding friendship between North Korea and China. Kim reaffirmed his commitment to meet with President Trump, and repeated vague statements about his regime’s willingness to denuclearize under the right conditions.
That is about the extent of what we know. What we don’t know is what any of it means.
We suspect that China summoned Kim to Beijing in order to warn the North Korean dictator about his behavior and to hear from him what his intentions are. China has long played a dangerous game with North Korea. China’s leadership holds the DPRK in derision and considers the Kim dynasty both a menace and a nuisance, but it’s wholly committed to keeping the North Korean state from collapse: If the DPRK collapses and it reunifies with South Korea, China will have a close U.S. ally on its border. For the paranoiacs who run the PRC’s State Council, that is an intolerable circumstance that must be avoided at any cost.
From China’s point of view, then, the present situation is a dangerous one. North Korea’s saber-rattling over the last year and a half—test firings of missiles, fiery speeches, boasts of the ability to strike the U.S. mainland—have provoked intermittently bellicose rhetoric from the White House and further solidified U.S. relations with South Korea. Moreover, and perhaps equally important, Trump has now tapped the most famous hawk in Washington to be his national security adviser.
China may be justifiably concerned that North Korean pugnaciousness will provoke a war with the United States, a war the North Koreans cannot win. That, combined with Trump’s gleeful threats of a trade war with China, may well have impelled the PRC to inform Kim that now’s not the time to make things difficult with the Americans.
China would have not just the motivation to make that demand of North Korea, but the authority to do so. It’s China, primarily, that supports the DPRK and keeps it from falling, both with direct illegal appropriations and deliberate negligence in enforcing sanctions.
But China’s aims with North Korea are complex and shift with circumstances. Perhaps it’s wisest, then, to bear in mind what we know. What we know, and what we devoutly hope U.S. policymakers realize, is that North Korea has no intention to denuclearize. Whatever Kim Jong-un may say, whatever Western diplomats and think-tank gurus may think he means, there is no circumstance under which the DPRK would willingly get rid of its nuclear weapons. Those weapons, whether or not their capacity is what Kim claims they are, serve multiple purposes for the regime: as an insurance against invasion, as a way to provoke the United States and play on the international stage, as a way to extract welfare aid from China and other nations, and so on. For nearly 40 years—even when the country was ravaged by famine and the regime was on the verge of collapse—North Korea feverishly pressed ahead with its nuclear program. Nuclear capability is bound up with its national identity. The little nation’s entire economy, such as it is, exists largely to support the government’s nuclear missile program. The regime has no plans to give up that capability simply to appear nice and gratify international poohbahs.
What we also know—or at least what it’s safe to assume—is that Kim Jong-un is not averse to engaging the United States in a nuclear confrontation. That may seem like madness to American policymakers, but it may well look like national destiny to Kim and his regime’s twisted elites.
So whatever happens as a result of the Kim-Xi meeting in Beijing, we hope the president and administration officials will not flatter themselves into thinking they’ve scared Kim into callling the whole thing off. We hope the president’s tweet from early Wednesday—”Now there is a good chance that Kim Jong-un will do what is right for his people and for humanity”—is rhetorical smoke rather than a reflection of the president’s sentiment.
The administration has rightly expanded and tightened sanctions against North Korean and the individuals and entities that do business with it. Now is the time to redouble those efforts, not to relax them. The goal, remember, is not to bring Kim to his senses—he is past that. The goal is to bring his regime to an end.
